The Format Wars in retrospect.

[wd40addict]

Another similar thing was the Bernoulli disc which offered high capacity for its time.

[Dave Moll]

Also mentioned in post 38.

[Nuvistor]

Perhaps not a format war as such but more an evolution, the computer HDD. From the 1956 IBM RAMAC with around 4MB of storage to the Terrabytes available now in a physical size that will fit in a pocket while the RAMAC needed lots of floor space and power.

The HDD in many areas is losing the format war to the newer SSD but the HDD will be around for quite a while longer.

[Gulliver]

I remember reading in the very early 90s that a 1Gb HDD in the 5.25" format was considered impossible. Just a few years later I was installing a 1.2Gb Quantum Bigfoot drive in my PC. Computer memory and storage has increased in size phenomenally, and reduced similarly in price.

The memory card format "war" was short but certainly happened....Sony Memory Stick, XD cards supported by Olympus, SD cards, MMC/SM cards, CF cards. In the end SD cards won despite not being "the best". The cards themselves are conveniently small, but just about large enough to handle even by less dextrous people. But CF were more robust physically.

[emeritus]

I understand that CF cards of high capacity are being used in some current professional cameras, possibly because they are less fiddly than SD cards? I still use my old Pentax 330 digital camera, and now low-capacity (1Gb!) CF cards are sold for older cameras like mine that cannot use the capacity of what is now the normal range of high capacity CF cards. The camera came with a 16Mb card!

[vidjoman]

My old Tom Tom satnav was fitted with an IBM microdrive. Physically the same, and compatible with the Compact Flash cards. It held more data than any other plugin card at the time. Think it was 4Gb when other cards were 1Gb.

[electronicskip]

I suppose you could add the Polaroid Polavision v 8mm cine film/beta/vhs into the format wars although obviously the Polavision was a big flop so not much of a war .
Ihave a Polavision system myself but never actually tried it.

[knobtwiddler]

Originally Posted by emeritus

I understand that CF cards of high capacity are being used in some current professional cameras, possibly because they are less fiddly than SD cards? I still use my old Pentax 330 digital camera, and now low-capacity (1Gb!) CF cards are sold for older cameras like mine that cannot use the capacity of what is now the normal range of high capacity CF cards. The camera came with a 16Mb card!

Cameras that use the full-size CF card are on the way out. CF Express is replacing them. For example, the industry standard 5D MKiv (2016) has CF, whereas its equivalent replacement, the R5 (2020) and R5mk2 (2024) use CFe. You can still buy a few models that'll take the full-size CF card, but I suspect that these models were made in large runs a while back and are old stock.

If we're on the topic of obsolete photographic formats, what about the Kodak disc? How long did that last? I guess it was an attempt to make 35mm film more idiot-proof.

[G6Tanuki]

CF had a lot in common with the IDE interface used on moving-rust hard drives, meaning that it was well understood. There were several different speed classes, which were important to know about because it affected the ability for you to do burst shooting with a DSLR, the IBM microdrives were slow.... So once your camera had filled its internal buffer you had to wait while the buffer flushed.

Up until recently, CF was still popular with professional users, particularly for video - there were some camera manufacturers who sold modular memory cartridges containing multiple CF cards that were written to in parallel to get greatest bandwidth.

When you are shooting 8K raw video at 150 frames per second you need a lot of memory bandwidth!!

[G6Tanuki]

As well as the Kodak Disc, which rightfully disappeared after a few years, there was also APS, Advanced Photo System, which was a relatively successful but short lived approach to making photo film easier for non techie people to use. It arrived just as digital cameras were starting to appear !

The coming of digital photography of course killed off the still film camera by about 2002.

"Shift Happens" as they say.

I first saw a digital camera in about 1996, and bought my first, a Panasonic NV-DCF1, in 1997. 640x480, fixed focus lens, and a CF card with a massive 2 Megabytes of storage, enough to store about 8 photos.

[dave walsh]

Coming off frank's Computer reference re HDD development [p143*] I recall my shock in seeing that an IBM "Personal"Computer might be as much as £5k as a basic item in the early eighties. The advent of Amstrad equipment with PC's up to £500 was an obvious game changer. Early ones didn't even have a memory store and masqueraded as Word Processors but attracted a lot of interest and I think that qualifies as a Format War. I didn't know whether to post here or in the Computer section but it seemed to be the right place!

I've never been very good with these machines and I look forward to them all being voice operated [yes I know it can be done already]. In 1994 I helped out with a chap suffering from dementia. I stored all his radio equipment etc for 3 years and eventually I was told to keep them, including a State of the Art Rainbow 100A Computer [from 1984]. Due to a flood in my cellar it, unfortunately, fell into disrepair. Even so I kept it in the lounge [without the monitor] and enjoyed asking visitors what they thought it was? A classic suggestion was "An Oil Filled Radiator" . It did look a bit similar and two small flaps hid the disc entry! Nothing like subsequent machines really!

Last November I located a chap who was near to me in the North and I passed the Rainbow on, FOC, to keep it from further harm. It's an understatement when he now comments that it took quite some time to restore. I'm even more ignorant about computer electronics than their operation but his description of resolving "cataracts" on the screen is particularly interesting! He's done a magnificent job on this 40 year old vintage item . Well worth a look

His Website is reached by "Rob's Old Computers Rainbow 100A Restoration Posted 29/7/25". Times have changed!

Dave

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

As well as the Kodak Disc, which rightfully disappeared after a few years, there was also APS, Advanced Photo System, which was a relatively successful but short lived approach to making photo film easier for non techie people to use. It arrived just as digital cameras were starting to appear !

The coming of digital photography of course killed off the still film camera by about 2002.

"Shift Happens" as they say.

I first saw a digital camera in about 1996, and bought my first, a Panasonic NV-DCF1, in 1997. 640x480, fixed focus lens, and a CF card with a massive 2 Megabytes of storage, enough to store about 8 photos.

From what I remember Kodak introduced the disc camera after their instant photo cameras had to be withdrawn from the market after a court battle with Polaroid, and Kodak needed a new format of camera to fill the gap.

My parents had an APS camera which worked well but lost it on holiday and replaced it with a digital one.

I can remember the Innovations catalogue in the mid 90s had a digit camera for around £500 and was the size of a camcorder from the same era.

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

The memory card format "war" was short but certainly happened....Sony Memory Stick, XD cards supported by Olympus, SD cards, MMC/SM cards, CF cards. In the end SD cards won despite not being "the best". The cards themselves are conveniently small, but just about large enough to handle even by less dextrous people. But CF were more robust physically.

There was also the (removable) PCMCIA card too - much bigger!

[emeritus]

I used to work with a guy who had been one of Kodak's patent attorneys. He told me he had reviewed Polariod's patents in great detail and had concluded that Kodak's instant camera system would almost certainly infringe them. His advice was ignored, and Kodak duly paid the price.

[Gulliver]

Talk of the "microdrive" reminds me of the sinclair Microdrive for Spectrum and QL computers, also seen in the ICL OPD. Sort of a stringy floppy or even a reduced size endless loop tape cartridge. Said to be very unreliable at the time but plenty of the Microdrive carts still work today.

In the film photography world there have been so many formats, some competing some supposed to supersede existing ones. APS had many problems, not least it tried to solve problems that nobody was asking to be solved. It was supposedly easier to load than 35mm, but a full decade before APS appeared there were automatic loading compact 35mm cameras. The various aspect ratios were simply cropping the full frame, making for lower quality pictures. The cameras were slightly smaller than 35mm but not enough to make a real difference in terms of portability. One could not home process APS films. APS slide film was barely available for a short time, and only from Fuji...so serious users weren't attracted to the format. The one thing it did have going for it was hot-swapping film cassettes. This was possible with the 110 pocket format, albeit at the price of losing one frame. APS permitted swapping to a different ISO or from colour to B&W without losing a shot on either film.

But the real killer was the fact that APS needed new mini-labs to process the films...and Kodak threatened to remove Kodak certification from labs that preferred to remain with the machines that were "only" able to process existing formats.....to retain their certification and that familiar yellow sign above the door....a lab owner had to undergo training and lease a new mini-lab machine at a cost of tens of thousands. I know labs which are *still* salty about that 30 years on.

And finally it was launched too late to make any difference. Digital was obviously coming along and anyone thinking of buying a new camera was going to be considering digital. If they already had a camera and were looking for something new, it made a lot of sense to wait a couple of years for cheaper digital cameras. Additionally, anyone who saw the prints from typical pocket sized APS cameras was often disappointed with the quality.

With previous successful formats, there were some clear advantages. 35mm was smaller and easier to handle than the rollfilm formats like 120 and 220 - but good enough. 126 was genuinely more easy to use with it's drop in cartridge and "instamatic" cameras. 110 was genuinely a pocket format which women and kids could carry around in handbags or pockets. And many others whch enjoyed populiarity for some decades before fading away...they all solved problems people were actually experiencing.

Same with super 8 and std 8mm cine film. Super 8 with it's drop in cartridge meant no more threading film, no more turning it over half way, hot-swapping was possible losing only 3 frames, less likely to mess up and fog the film, bigger picture area so higher quality...though slightly less run time per 50 foot reel.

[knobtwiddler]

Something I only learnt recently is the fact that SSDs have a limited number of read / write cycles (I have never thought about it before), meaning that HDDs are likely to be around for a while yet. Items such as CCTV recorders still use HDDs, as an SSD would likely give up the ghost after a few weeks. The whole situation has gotten me a little worried, as a lot of my photography lives on SSDs, as do live recordings of audio.

[wd40addict]

I believe it's only writes that degrade SSDs, hence wear levelling etc.

Re the Kodak disc cameras I saw the presentation they used to justify it. Basically they claimed to have analysed lots of pictures and decided that the perfect lens for field of view and depth of field was very short focal length (12.5mm?). To get sharp edge to edge pictures the film needs to be very flat hence the disc rather than a roll.

All in all it sounded a bit like RCA's justification for 45 RPM!

The cynic would say Kodak used to introduce a new format every ten years or so try and drum up business. Also this was the era of early PCs so the term 'disc' would have high tech cachet rather like AI now.

[G6Tanuki]

Another 'format' war happened in the 80s and early 90s inside the PC.

The original IBM-PC had a well documented expansion bus, so anyone could essentially build compatible PC clones as well as expansion cards that would work in both genuine IBM PCs and clones.

This then evolved into the PC/AT bus, again well documented and open.

IBM then introduced the PS/2 series, with a somewhat better, but proprietary, expansion bus - Micro Channel Architecture. If you wanted to produce clones of this or expansion cards to fit it you had to pay license fees to IBM. The benefits of MCA were only really worth the price for server systems.

So a bunch of manufacturers of small servers, led primarily by Compaq, got together and invented EISA, Extended Industry Standard Architecture, whose planar board socket could accommodate both dedicated EISA cards and the old PC/AT style.

IBM's PS/2 series and MCA are now largely forgotten. But IBM are still in business unlike Compaq!

Now, where's my Adaptec 1541 SCSI card?

[Gulliver]

Originally Posted by wd40addict

I believe it's only writes that degrade SSDs, hence wear levelling etc.

Re the Kodak disc cameras I saw the presentation they used to justify it. Basically they claimed to have analysed lots of pictures and decided that the perfect lens for field of view and depth of field was very short focal length (12.5mm?). To get sharp edge to edge pictures the film needs to be very flat hence the disc rather than a roll.

All in all it sounded a bit like RCA's justification for 45 RPM!

The cynic would say Kodak used to introduce a new format every ten years or so try and drum up business. Also this was the era of early PCs so the term 'disc' would have high tech cachet rather like AI now.

I keep all my digital photos backed up on HDDs....two sets of HDDs stored in different locations. I only keep one set of film negatives/transparencies though. So if m house burns down, they're going to be lost. On the other hand, assuming no fire....they will outlive me for sure. Even the ones I shot as a child.

Kodak kind of had a point regarding flat film. Though the roll film formats have effective pressure plates which keep the film flat - or some (usually cheap) cameras deliberately incorporate a curve into the film path to compensate for simple lenses.

The cartridge formats such as 110 and 126 didn't have effective pressure plates. The majority of cameras for those formats were of the "instamatic" type but there were some very serious pieces of kit too. The Minolta and Pentax 110 SLR cameras suffered a bit due to the film not always being flat. The disc could solve that problem. Discs were also very much part of pop culture as floppy discs were seen as something aspirational at the time. In the same way that Hoover used the word "turbo", Kodak latched onto "disc" as a buzzword....a few years later everything under the sun was suddenly "digital". The cameras for that format were generally very slim, but even with the tiny negative (smaller than 110 by some margin) the cameras were quite large in "footprint" terms. And that tiny negative meant the prints were grainy. Kodak insisted that using a three element enlarger lens would solve this but I never saw even one remotely good print from a Disc camera. However, they did bring us Kodacolor VR film and the T-grain B&W films - which were a product line developed to reduce grain size in films and initially launched for the Disc format.

No doubt the marketing divisions of the camera and film manufacturers loved new formats. Some of them genuinely solved problems that users experienced, or brought new people into photography. Some were a bit of a dead end and/or unnecessary. And sometimes the "problem" being solved was, "How can we convince people to buy another camera?". Though admittedly, just as often the question was "How can we make photography so easy and cheap that everyone feels they *can* buy a camera?".

Ultimately people, even the folks who just bought a couple of films a year for snapshots of family holidays, weren't satisfied with Disc film's images. Additionally, once again, the fact that the disc film needed a dedicated processing machine cost labs that wanted to embrace the new format a lot of money. And it's not feasible to hand-process disc film at home (though latterly some intrepid people have done so). Probably why 35mm and 120 persisted in the mainstream throughout all the new formats. Every lab can process them. Almost every home processing system can do both too. Though it is worth noting that other less mainstream film formats are still catered for in small numbers including 110, 127, glass plates of various sizes....no 126, APS or disc though.

[G6Tanuki]

The suggestion that Kodak liked to introduce new formats on a regular basis is sort of logical if you are trying to get people to buy new cameras and sell new machines to the processing labs.

Allegedly, Kodak techies developed one of the first practical digital cameras but when they showed it to Kodak management there was panic when they realised that though it was a new format and could generate a market for new cameras it would also knock out the highly profitable film-and-processing-labs part of Kodak's business model so they blocked further work on digital.

Kodak subsequently went bust, the brand got sold on, the last Kodak product I saw was a pack of AA batteries.